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The word anthropology was first used
in the philosophical faculties of German
universities at the end of the 16th century to refer to the systematic study
of man as a physical and moral being.
Philosophical anthropology is thus, literally, the systematic study of man
conducted within philosophy or by the reflective methods characteristic of
philosophy; it might in particular be thought of as being concerned with
questions of the status of man in the universe, of the purpose or meaning of
human life, and, indeed, with the issues of whether there is any such
meaning and of whether man can be made an object of systematic study. What
actually falls under the term philosophical anthropology, however, varies
with conceptions of the nature and scope of philosophy. The fact that such
disciplines as physics, chemistry, and biology--which are now classified as
natural sciences--were until the 19th century all branches of natural
philosophy serves as a reminder that conceptions of philosophy have changed.
Twentieth-century readings of
philosophical anthropology are much narrower than those of previous
centuries. Four possible meanings are now accepted: (1) the account of man
that is contained in any comprehensive philosophy; (2) a particular
philosophical orientation known as humanism (see HUMANISM
), in which the study of man provides the foundation for all else--a
position that has been prominent since the Renaissance; (3) a distinctive,
20th-century form of humanism that on occasion has claimed the label of
"philosophical anthropology" for itself and that has taken the
human condition, the personal being-in-the-world, as its starting point; and
(4) any study of man that is regarded as unscientific. Philosophical
anthropology has been used in the last sense by 20th-century antihumanists
for whom it has become a term of abuse; antihumanists have insisted that if
anthropology is to be possible at all it is possible only on the condition
that it rejects the concept of the individual human subject. Humanism, in
their eyes, yields only a prescientific, and hence a philosophical (or
ideological), nonscientific anthropology.
By tracing the development of the
philosophy of man, it will thus be possible to deal, in turn, with the four
meanings of philosophical anthropology. First, however, it is necessary to
discuss the concept of human nature, which is central to any anthropology
and to philosophical debates about the sense in which and the extent to
which man can be made an object of systematic, scientific study.
For coverage of related topics, see
SPECTRUM, section 10/52, and the Index.
The concept of human
nature is a common part of everyday thought. The ordinary person
feels that he comes to know human nature through the character and conduct
of the people he meets. Behind what they do he recognizes qualities that
often do not surprise him: he forms expectations as to the sort of qualities
possessed by other human beings and about the ways they differ from, for
example, dogs or horses. People are proud, sensitive, eager for recognition
or admiration, often ambitious, hopeful or despondent, and selfish or
capable of self-sacrifice. They take satisfaction in their achievements,
have within them something called a conscience, and are loyal or disloyal.
Experience in dealing with and observing people gives rise to a conception
of a predictable range of conduct; conduct falling outside the range that is
considered not to be worthy of a human is frequently regarded as inhuman or
bestial whereas that which is exceptional--in that it lives up to standards
which most people recognize but few achieve--is regarded as superhuman or
saintly. (see also human
behaviour, personality)
The common conception of human
nature thus implicitly locates man on a scale of perfection, placing him
somewhere above most animals but below saints, prophets, or angels. This
idea was embodied in the theme, Hellenic in origin, of the Great
Chain of Being--a hierarchical order ascending from the most simple
and inert to the most complex and active: mineral, vegetable, animal, man,
and finally divine beings superior to man. In the Middle Ages these divine
beings constituted the various orders of angels, with God as the single,
supremely perfect and omnipotent, ever-active being. There was a tendency in
this theory to take for granted the commonality among all human beings,
something by virtue of which they could be classified as fully human, which
differentiates them from all other animals, and which gives them their place
in the order of things. Yet, as with many notions that are habitually
employed, the request for a precise definition of "human nature"
proves highly problematic. (see also religion,
philosophy of)
The Greeks--most notably Plato and
Aristotle--introduced the notion of form,
nature, or essence as an explanatory,
metaphysical concept. Variations on this concept were central to Western
thought until the 17th century. Observation of the natural world raised the
question of why creatures reproduced after their kind and could not be
interbred at will and of why, for example, acorns grew into oaks and not
into roses. To explain such phenomena it was postulated that the seeds,
whether plant or animal, must each already contain within them the form,
nature, or essence of the species from which they were derived and into
which they would subsequently develop. This pattern of explanation is
preserved in the modern biological concept of a genetic
code that is embodied in the DNA
molecular structure of each cell. There are important differences, however,
between the modern concept of a genetic code and the older, Greek-derived
concept of form or essence.
First, biologists are now able to
locate, isolate, experimentally analyze, and manipulate DNA molecules in
what has become known as genetic engineering. Being the structures
responsible for physical development, DNA molecules represent the terms by
which man can be biologically characterized. Forms or essences, on the other
hand, were not observable; if they were granted any independent existence,
it was as immaterial entities. The form, nature, or essence of man or of any
other kind of being was posited as a principle present in the thing,
determining its kind by producing in it an innate tendency to strive to
develop into a perfect example of itself--to fulfill its nature and to
realize its full potential as a thing of a given kind. This gave rise to a teleological,
or purposive, view of the natural world in which developments were explained
by reference to the goal toward which each natural thing, by its nature,
strives; i.e., by reference to the
ideal form it seeks to realize. By contrast, the genetic structure present
in each cell is now invoked to explain the subsequent development of an
organism in a "mechanistic" and nonpurposive way, in which
development is shown to be dependent upon and determined by preexisting
structures and conditions.
Second, genetic mutability forms an
essential part of modern evolutionary
biology. Not only are there genetic differences between individuals of a
given species to account for differences between them in features, such as
coloration, but random genetic mutation in
the presence of changing environmental conditions may result in alterations
to the genetic constitution of the species as a whole. Thus, in evolutionary
biological theory species are not stable; natural kinds do not have the
fixed, immutable forms or essences characteristic of biology before the
advent of evolutionary theory.
Within either framework, if human
nature is understood simply as man's special form of that which is
biologically inherited in all species, there remains the delicate problem of
discovering, in any given case, exactly what role environment
plays in determining the actual characteristics of mature members of the
species. Even in the case of purely physiological characteristics this may
be far from straightforward: for example, the extent to which diet,
exercise, and conditions of work determine such things as susceptibility to
heart disease and cancer remains the subject of intensive scientific
investigation. In the case of behavioral and psychological characteristics,
such as intelligence, the problems are
multiplied to the point where they are no longer problems that can be
answered by purely empirical investigation. There is room for much
conceptual debate about what is meant by intelligence and over what tests,
if any, can be supposed to yield a direct measure of this capacity, and thus
provide evidence that an individual's level of intelligence is determined at
birth (by nature) rather than by subsequent exposure to the environment
(nurture) that conditions the development of all his capacities. (see also heredity versus environment)
This debate--whether the variation
in intelligence levels is a product of the conditions into which people all
having the same initial potential are born, or whether it is a reflection of
variations in the capacities with which they are born--is very closely
related to the question of whether there is such a thing as human nature
common to all human beings, or whether there are intrinsic differences among
those whom we recognize as belonging to the biological species Homo sapiens. This is because, as the name Homo sapiens suggests, man is traditionally thought to be
distinguished from and privileged above other animals by virtue of his
possession of reason, or intellect. When the intellect is positively valued
as that which is distinctively human and which confers superiority on man,
the thought that different races
of people differ by nature in their intellectual capacities has been used as
a justification for a variety of racist attitudes and policies. Those of
another race, of supposedly lesser intellectual development, are classified
as less than fully human and therefore as needing to be accorded less than
full human rights. Similarly, the thought that women are by nature
intellectually inferior to men has been used as a justification for their
domination by men, for refusing them education, and even for according them
the legal status of property owned by men. On the other hand, if differences
in adult intellectual capacity are regarded as a product of the
circumstances in which potentially similar people are brought up, the
attitude is to consider all as equally human but some as having been more
privileged when growing up than others. (see also sexism)
More radically, the evidence for
variations in intelligence levels may be questioned by challenging the
objectivity of the standards relative to which these levels are assessed. It
may be argued that conceptions of what constitutes a rational or intelligent
response to a situation or to a problem are themselves culturally
conditioned, a product of the way in which the members of the group devising
the tests and making the judgments have themselves been taught to think.
Such an argument has the effect of undermining claims by any one human group
to intellectual superiority over others, whether these others be their
contemporaries or their own forebears. Hence, they may also be used to
discredit any idea of a progressive development of human intellectual
capacities. (see also intelligence test)
These debates about intelligence and
rationality provide an example of the complexity of the impact of
evolutionary biology on conceptions of human nature, for the dominant
traditions in Western thought about human nature have tended to concentrate
attention more on what distinguishes man from other animals than on the
strictly biological constitution that he largely shares with them.
Possession of reason or intellect is far from being the only candidate
considered for such a distinguishing characteristic. Man has been
characterized as essentially a tool user, or fabricator (Homo faber), as
essentially social, as essentially a language user, and so on. These
represent differing views concerning the fundamental feature that gives rise
to all the other qualities regarded as distinctively human and which serve
to mark man off from other animals. These characteristics all centre on
mental, intellectual, psychological--i.e.,
nonphysiological--characteristics and thus leave scope for debate about the
relation between mind and body. So long as this question remains open, and
so long as mental or intellectual constitution remains the central
consideration in discussions of human nature, the question of changes
in--and of the possible evolution of--human nature will remain relatively
independent of those devoted to physiological change and hence of strictly
biological evolution.
Until the 15th century the standard
assumption was that man had a fixed nature, one that determined both his
place in the universe and his destiny. The Renaissance humanists, however,
proclaimed that what distinguishes man from all other creatures is that he
has no nature. This was a way of asserting that man's actions are not bound
by laws of nature in the way that those of other creatures are. Man is
capable of taking responsibility for his own actions because he has the
freedom to exercise his will. This view received two subsequent
interpretations.
First, the human character is
indefinitely plastic; each individual is given determinate form by the
environment in which he is born, brought up, and lives. In this case,
changes or developments in human beings will be regarded as the product of
social or cultural changes, changes that themselves are often more rapid
than biological evolution. It is thus to disciplines such as history,
politics, and sociology, rather than to biology, that one should look for an
understanding of these processes. But if disciplines such as these must
constitute the primary study of man, then the question of the extent to
which this can be a strictly scientific study arises. The methods of history
are not, and cannot be, those of the natural sciences. And the legitimacy of
the claims of the so-called social or human sciences to genuine scientific
status has frequently been called into question and remains a focus for
debate.
Second, each individual is
autonomous and must "make" himself. Assertion of the autonomy of
man involves rejection of the possibility of discovering laws of human
behaviour or of the course of history, for freedom is precisely not being
bound by law, by nature. In this case, the study of man can never be
parallel to the natural sciences with their theoretical structures based on
the discovery of laws of nature. (M.E.T.)
In the tradition of Western thought
up to the 20th century, the study of man has been regarded as a part of
philosophy. Two sayings that have been adopted as mottoes by those who see
themselves as engaged in philosophical anthropology date from the 5th
century BC. These are: "Man is the measure of all things"
(Protagoras) and "Know thyself" (a saying from the Delphic oracle,
echoed by Heracleitus and Socrates, among others). Both reflect the specific
orientation of philosophical anthropology as humanism,
which takes man as its starting point and treats man and the study of man as
the centre, or origin, on which all other disciplines ultimately depend.
Man, the world, and God have
constituted three important foci of Western thought from the beginnings of
its recorded history; the relative significance of these three themes,
however, has varied from one epoch to another. Western thought has laid
greater stress on the existence of the individual human being than have the
great speculative systems of the East; in Brahmanism, for example, personal
identity dissolves in the All. But even so it was not until the Renaissance
that man became the primary focus of philosophical attention and that the
study of human nature began to displace theology and metaphysics as
"first philosophy"--the branch of philosophy that is regarded as
forming the foundation for all subsequent philosophy and that provides the
framework for all scientific investigation.
Philosophical
Anthropology
From late antiquity onward differing
views of man were worked out within a framework that was laid down and given
initial development by Plato and later by Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle
concurred in according to metaphysics the
status of first philosophy. Their differing views of man were a consequence
of their differing metaphysical views.
Plato's
metaphysics was dualistic: the everyday physical world of changeable things,
which man comes to know by the use of his senses, is not the primary reality
but is a world of appearances, or phenomenal
manifestations, of an underlying timeless and unchanging reality, an
immaterial realm of Forms that is knowable only by use of the intellect.
This is the view expressed in the Republic
in his celebrated metaphor of the cave, where the changeable physical world
is likened to shadows cast on the wall of a cave by graven images. To know
the real world the occupants of the cave must first turn around and face the
graven images in the light that casts the shadows (i.e.,
use their judgment instead of mere fantasy) and, second, must leave the cave
to study the originals of the graven images in the light of day (stop
treating their senses as the primary source of knowledge
and start using their intellects). Similarly, human bodily existence is
merely an appearance of the true reality of human being. The identity of a
human being does not derive from the body but from the character of his or
her soul, which is an immaterial (and therefore nonsexual) entity, capable
of being reincarnated in different human bodies. There is thus a divorce
between the rational/spiritual and the material aspects of human existence,
one in which the material is devalued. (see also mind-body
dualism, experience, idea)
Aristotle,
however, rejected Plato's dualism. He insisted that the physical, changeable
world made up of concrete individual substances (people, horses, plants,
stones, etc.) is the primary reality. Each individual substance may be
considered to be a composite of matter and form, but these components are
not separable, for the forms of changeable things have no independent
existence. They exist only when materially instantiated. This general
metaphysical view, then, undercut Plato's body-soul dualism. Aristotle
dismissed the question of whether soul and body are one and the same as
being as meaningless as the question of whether a piece of wax and the shape
given to it by a seal are one. The soul is the form of the body, giving life
and structure to the specific matter of a human being. According to
Aristotle, all human beings are the same in respect to form (that which
constitutes them as human), and their individual differences are to be
accounted for by reference to the matter in which this common form is
variously instantiated (just as the different properties of golf and squash
balls are derived from the materials of which they are made, while their
common geometrical properties are related to their similar size and shape).
This being so, it is impossible for an individual human soul to have any
existence separate from the body. Reincarnation is thus ruled out as a
metaphysical impossibility. Further, the physical differences between men
and women become philosophically significant, the sex of a person becoming a
crucial part of his or her identity.
Although Plato and Aristotle gave a
different metaphysical status to forms, their role in promoting and giving
point to investigations of human nature was very similar. They both agreed
that it is necessary to have knowledge of human nature in order to determine
when and how human life flourishes. It is through knowledge of shared human
nature that we become aware of the ideals at which we should aim, achieved
by learning what constitutes fulfillment of our distinctively human
potential and the conditions under which this becomes possible. These ideals
are objectively determined by our nature. But we are privileged in being
endowed with the intellectual capacities that make it possible for us to
have knowledge of this nature. Development of our intellectual capacities is
thus a necessary part and precondition of a fulfilled human existence.
Western medieval culture was
dominated by the Christian Church. This influence was naturally reflected in
the philosophy of the period. Theology,
rather than metaphysics, tended to be given primacy, even though many of the
structures of Greek philosophy, including its metaphysics, were preserved.
The metaphysics of form and matter was readily assimilable into Christian
thought, where forms became ideas in the mind of God, the patterns according
to which he created and continues to sustain the universe. Christian
theology, however, modified the positions, requiring some sort of compromise
between Platonic and Aristotelian views. The creation story in the book of
Genesis made man a creature among other creatures, but not a creature like
other creatures; man was the product of the final act of divine initiative,
was given responsibility for the Garden of Eden, and had the benefit of a
direct relationship with his creator. The Fall and redemption, the
categories of sin and grace,
thus concern only the descendants of Adam, who were given a nature radically
different from that of the animals and plants over which they were given
dominion. Man alone can, after a life in this world, hope to participate in
an eternal life that is far more important than the temporal life that he
will leave. Thus, belief in a life after death makes it impossible to regard
man as wholly a natural being and entails that the physical world now
inhabited by man is not the sole, or even the primary, reality. Yet, the
characteristically Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body also
entails that the human body cannot be regarded as being of significance only
in the mortal, physical world. (see also Middle
Ages, Christianity, creation
myth, afterlife)
Against the background of these
constraints, Christian philosophy first, through the writings of St.
Augustine, gave prominence to Platonic views. But this emphasis was
superseded in the 12th century by the Aristotelianism of St.
Thomas Aquinas. Augustine's God is a wholly immaterial, supremely
rational, transcendent creator of the universe. The twofold task of the
Christian philosopher, a lover of wisdom, is to seek knowledge of the nature
of God and of his own soul, the human self. For Augustine the soul is not
the entire man but his better part. There remains a Platonic tendency to
regard the body as a prison for the soul and a mark of man's fallen state.
One of the important consequences of Augustine's own pursuit of these two
endeavours was the emphasis he came to place on the significance of free
will. He argued that since the seat of the will was reason, when
people exercise their will, they are acting in the image of God, the supreme
rational being. Thomas Aquinas, while placing less emphasis on the will,
also regarded man as acting in the image of God to the extent that he
exercises and seeks to fulfill his intelligent nature. But he rejected the
Platonic tendency to devalue the body, insisting that it is part of the
concept of man that he have flesh and bone, as well as a soul.
But whatever the exact balance
struck in the relation between the mind and body, the view of man was first
and foremost as a creature of God; man was privileged by having been created
in the image of God and given the gift of reason in virtue of which he also
has free will and must take the burden of moral responsibility for his own
actions. In order to fulfill his distinctively human nature man must thus
order his thoughts and actions in such a way as to reflect the supremacy of
religious values.
In popular medieval culture there
was also, however, a strong undercurrent of thoroughly fatalistic thought.
This was reflected in the popularity of astrology and alchemy, both of which
appealed to the idea that events on Earth are governed by the influence of
the heavenly bodies.
It was in the cultural context of
the Renaissance, and in particular with the Italian humanists and their
imitators, that the centre of gravity of reflective thought descended from
heaven to earth, with man, his nature, and his capacities and limitations
becoming a primary focus of philosophical attention. This gave rise to the
humanism that constitutes philosophical anthropology in the second sense.
Man did not thereby cease to view himself within the context of the world,
nor did he deny the existence of God; he did, however, disengage himself
sufficiently from the bonds of cosmic determination and divine authority to
become a centre of interest in his own eyes. In ancient literature the
educated people of the West rediscovered a clear conscience instead of the
guilty conscience of Christianity; at the same time, the great inventions
and discoveries suggested that man could take pride in his accomplishments
and regard himself with admiration. The themes of the dignity and excellence
of man were prominent in Italian humanist thought and can be found clearly
expressed in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's
influential De
hominis dignitate oratio (Oration on the Dignity of Man), written
in 1486. In this work Pico expresses a view of man that breaks radically
with Greek and Christian tradition: what distinguishes man from the rest of
creation is that he has been created without form and with the ability to
make of himself what he will. Being without form or nature he is not
constrained, fated, or determined to any particular destiny. Thus, he must
choose what he will become. (In the words of the 20th-century
existentialists, man is distinguished by the fact that for him existence
precedes essence.) In this way man's distinctive characteristic becomes his
freedom; he is free to make himself in the image of God or in the image of
beasts.
This essentially optimistic view of
man was a product of the revival of Neoplatonist thought. Its optimism is
based on a view of man as at least potentially a nonnatural, godlike being.
But this status is now one that must be earned; man must win his right to
dominion over nature and in so doing earn his place beside God in the life
hereafter. He must learn both about himself and about the natural world in
order to be able to achieve this. This was, however, only one of two streams
of humanist thought. The other (more Aristotelian) was essentially more
pessimistic and skeptical, stressing the limitations on man's intellectual
capacities. There is an insistence on the need to be reconciled to the fact
of man's humanity rather than to persist in taking seriously his superhuman
pretensions and aspirations. These two differently motivated movements to
focus attention on man himself, on his nature, his abilities, his earthly
condition, and his relation to his material environment became more clearly
articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries in the opposition between the
rationalist and empiricist approaches to philosophy.
The thought of Michel
de Montaigne, the 16th-century French skeptical author of the Essais
(1580-95; Essays), represented one of the first attempts at anthropological
reflection (i.e., reflection
centred on man, which explores his different aspects in a spirit of
empirical investigation that is freed from all ties to dogma). Skepticism,
the adoption of an empirical approach, and liberation from dogmatic
authority are linked themes stemming from the more pessimistic views of
man's capacity for knowledge. The emphasis on man's humanity--on the limited
nature of his capacities--leads to a denial that he can, even by the use of
reason, transcend the realm of appearances;
the only form of knowledge available to him is experimental knowledge,
gained in the first instance by the use of the senses. The effect of this
skeptical move was twofold. The first effect was a liberation from the
dogmatic authority of claims to knowledge of a reality behind appearances
and of moral codes based on them; skeptical arguments were to the effect
that human beings are so constituted that such knowledge must always be
unavailable to them. The second effect was a renewal of attention to and
interest in the everyday world of appearances, which now becomes the only
possible object of human knowledge and concern. The project of seeking
knowledge of a reality behind appearances must be abandoned because it is
beyond the scope of human understanding. And this applies as much to man
himself as to the rest of the natural world; he can be known only
experientially, as he appears to himself. (see also empirical
method)
The anthropology of Montaigne began
with a turning in upon himself; it gave priority to that reality which was
within. Montaigne, however, was also witness to a renewal of knowledge
brought about by numerous discoveries that made the horizons of the
traditional universe expand greatly. For him, self-awareness already
reflected an awareness of the surrounding world; it wondered about the
"savages" of America and about the cannibals that were so
different from him and yet so near; it compared the intelligence of man with
that of beasts and accepted the idea of a relationship between animal
existence and human existence. The idea that moral codes are the work of
man, rather than reflective of an objective order, opened up the possibility
of recognizing the legitimate existence of a plurality of codes and thus of
the empirical study--rather than an immediate condemnation and rejection--of
the customs of others. (see also consciousness )
By contrast, the work of the
17th-century French philosopher René
Descartes represented a continuation of the theme of optimism about
man's capacities for knowledge. Descartes explicitly set out, in his Meditations
(first published in 1641), to beat the skeptics at their own game. He used
their methods and arguments in order to vindicate claims to be able to have
nonexperimental knowledge of a reality behind appearances. The Meditations
thus also begins with a turning in of Descartes upon himself but with the
aim of finding there something that would lead beyond the confines of his
own mind. (see also rationalism,
"Meditations on First Philosophy," )
Cartesianism
occupies a key position in the history of modern Western philosophy;
Descartes is treated as a founding father by most of its now diverse
traditions. His work is characteristic of the philosophical effort of the
17th century, which was engaged in a struggle to achieve a synthesis between
old established orders and the newly proclaimed freedoms that were based on
a skeptical rejection of the older orders. There are undeniable tensions in
the philosophy of this period that are the product of various unsuccessful
attempts to reconcile two very different views of man in relation to God and
the world.
The first, the authoritarian view,
was that inherited from medieval philosophy and from Thomist theology. It
derived its ideal of human freedom from the Stoic conception of the wise
man, who, in the 17th century was called a man of honestas
(the French concept of honnêteté).
The man of honestas seeks freedom
in the discovery of and obedience to the order and law on which the world is
grounded. He believes that there is such a law, that he has a
"place" in the scheme of things, and that he is bound to his
fellow human beings by that nature through which he participates in this
higher order. He tends to look to the authorities--whether these be church,
state, or classical texts--for knowledge of this order, for it is not to be
found at the level of experience; it is a "higher" order. His
worldview is derived from a mixture of Platonic and Aristotelian (realist)
metaphysics.
The second, the libertarian view,
was that of the skeptical humanists--individualists and freethinkers,
skeptical of any preestablished order, or at least of man's ability to know
what it is or might be. The skeptical humanist is therefore untrammeled by
it.He deploys skeptical arguments to release the individual from the
constraints and demands of outer authorities. He is free to do what he wills
or desires and to make his own destiny, for there can be no knowledge of
objective norms. Human knowledge is limited to experience, to what is
sensed, and people must therefore make their own order within experience.
His view is descended from the via
moderna of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham and the
nominalists.
The synthesis sought was a position
that would incorporate recognition of the individual and of his freedom
under universal principles of order, a reconciliation of will with reason.
This was sought via a nonauthoritarian conception of objective knowledge,
which was the same conception that gave rise to modern science. This
required, on the one hand, arguments to combat those of the skeptical
freethinkers--arguments that demonstrated that there was an objective order
external to human thought and that humans have the capacity not merely to
know of its existence but also to discover something of its nature. On the
other hand, it was necessary to establish, against the authorities, that
each individual, insofar as he is rational, has the capacity to acquire
knowledge for himself, by the proper use of his reason. It is this second
requirement that produced numerous treatises on the scope and limits of
human understanding and on the method of acquiring knowledge. The focus was
now firmly fixed on the nature of human thought and on the procedures
available to it. (see also science, philosophy of)
Descartes utilized the skeptic's own
arguments to urge a meditative turning inward. This inward journey was
designed to show that each human being can come to knowledge of his
intellectual self and that as he does so he will find within himself the
idea of God, the mark of his creator, the mark that assures him of the
existence of an objective order and of the objective validity of his
rational faculties. The foundation and starting point of Cartesian knowledge
is, for each individual, within himself, in his experience of the certainty
that he must have of his own existence and in the idea of a perfect,
infinite being, in other words, an idea that he finds within himself, of a
being whose essence entails God's existence, and of whose existence man can
thus be assured on the basis of his idea of God.
Descartes thus preserved and built
on Montaigne's emphasis on self-consciousness, and this is what marks the
changed orientation in philosophy that constitutes philosophical
anthropology in the stricter, second sense. As the French scientist and
religious philosopher Blaise Pascal
realized, the question had now become one of whether man finds within
himself the basis of loyalty to a universal order of reason and law with
which his own thought and will is continuous, or whether he finds, by inner
examination, that order, at least insofar as it can be known, is relative to
his feeling, desire, and will.
The attempt to regain an objective
order by looking inward apparently fails with the failure of Descartes's
proofs of the existence of God, proofs that his contemporaries (even those
who, like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, were sympathetic to many aspects of the
project) were quick to criticize. Reaction to this failure was twofold. In
the work of rationalist philosophers, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and
Malebranche, there is a return to the classical Greek approach to philosophy
through metaphysics. Empiricists, such as Locke, Condillac, and Hume, on the
other hand, retain the Cartesian, introspective basis seeking what Hume
calls a mitigated skepticism. This is a
position that recognizes essential limitations placed on human cognitive
capacities by assuming that experience is the only source of knowledge, but
that affirms the value of the knowledge so gained and seeks to define the
project of natural science as a quest for objective order within this
domain. (see also ontological
argument)
John Locke,
for instance, argued that while man cannot prove that the material world
exists, his senses give him evidence affording all the certainty that he
needs. Locke's position is, however, essentially dualist: mind and body
remain distinct even though pretensions to intellectual transcendence are
given up. Moreover, Locke regarded it as in principle impossible for humans
to have any understanding of the relation between mind
and body. All perceptions of one's own body, as of the rest of the material
world, are ideas in one's mind. It is impossible to adopt any vantage point
outside oneself from which to observe the correlation between a condition of
one's body and one's perception of this condition. Where other people are
concerned, their bodies and behaviour can be observed but an observer can
have no direct perception of what is going on in their minds. There is thus
a bifurcation in the study of man. The mind and its contents are known to
each person by introspection; it is presumed that the minds of all people
work in basically the same way so that introspection provides evidence for
human psychology. Other people, their bodies, and their behaviour are known
by observation in exactly the same way that knowledge of any other natural
object is obtained. One infers from their behaviour that they have minds
like one's own and on this basis attributes psychological states to them.
In keeping with this bifurcation
Locke distinguished between the terms "man" and "person,"
reserving "man" for the animal species, an object of study for
natural historians. "Person" is used to denote the moral subject,
the being who can be held responsible for his actions and thus praised,
blamed, or punished. According to Locke, what constitutes a person is a
characteristic continuity of consciousness, which is not merely rational
thought but the full range of mental states accessible to introspection.
Just as a tree is a characteristic organization of life functions sustained
by exchanges of matter, so a person is a characteristic organization of
mental functions continuing through changes in ideas (the matter of
thought). A person can be held responsible for an action only if he
acknowledges that action as one which he performed; i.e.,
one of which he is conscious and remembers having performed.
The empiricist position thus opens
up the possibility of empirical studies both of man as a natural and as a
moral being and puts these studies on a par with the natural sciences. But
it does so in such a way that the resulting picture lacks any integral
unity, for man is an incomprehensible union of body and mind.
A renewed study of the natural
history of man was stimulated by European encounters with the great anthropoid
apes of Africa (Angola) and Asia (the Sunda Islands) at the beginning of the
16th century. Until then Europe had known only the smaller monkeys, which
were too far removed from the human species to present any confusion. The
discovery of the chimpanzee and the orangutan (meaning "man of the
woods" in Malay) raised such questions as whether the anthropoid, who
resembles man, is an animal or a man, and why it should be considered an ape
and not a man. In the climate of opinion--typified by Locke and fostered by
the Royal Society of London, with its enthusiasm for empirical
observation--these questions prompted the detailed observational studies of
a leading member of the society, Edward Tyson.
(see also physical
anthropology)
Tyson had the opportunity to study
the remains of a young chimpanzee (named Pygmie) from Angola that had died
in London several months after its arrival. His research was published by
the Royal Society in 1699 under the title Orang-Outang,
sive Homo Sylvestris: or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a
Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. This treatise, a landmark in anthropology and
comparative anatomy, is remarkable for the empirical approach used in the
investigation. Tyson's precise measurements, his complete exploration of the
external and internal structures of the animal, and his minutely detailed
sketches permitted him to pose what is perhaps the central problem of
physical anthropology: whether it is possible to find among the anatomical
or physiological characteristics of the ape the justification for asserting
a radical difference between ape and man, notwithstanding all their
similarities. He analyzed in great detail the similarities and
dissimilarities between a chimpanzee and a man. He emphasized the fact that
the ape is a quadrumane (having four hands) rather than a quadruped (having
four feet); unlike the human foot, its foot has an opposable, and thus
thumblike, big toe. The arrangement of the internal organs allows the erect
posture that makes the ape similar to man. But on an analysis of the form
and mass of the brain and speech apparatus, Tyson concluded that he was
unable to determine, from a strictly anatomical point of view, why the ape
is incapable of thinking and speaking.
Integral to the empiricism that
forms the philsophical background to Tyson's work was a rejection of the
whole notion of forms or essences as objectively determining fixed and
strict demarcations within the natural world. Classification was the work of
man imposed upon a natural continuum, which replaced the older ladderlike
conception of the Chain of Being. This encouraged a quest for "missing
links," examples of intermediary forms between those already
recognized. For example, zoophytes (invertebrate animals resembling plants,
such as sponges) were said to form the link between the vegetable order and
the animal order. For Tyson, the chimpanzee was the missing link between
animal and man.
If physical anthropology was born
out of Western man's encounter with the anthropoid apes, cultural
anthropology was made necessary by his encounter with people in the
rest of the world during the great voyages of discovery begun in the 15th
century. Cultural anthropology became the product of the confrontation
between the classical values of the West and the opposing values and customs
of newly discovered civilizations. (see also overseas
exploration)
The "savage" appeared to
manifest a style of humanity that was a contradiction of the certainties
that had sustained Europeans for centuries. The shock was such that the
naked Indian and the cannibal were at first assumed not to belong to the
human race; this approach enabled Europeans to avoid the problem. This
solution was, however, rejected by Pope Paul III
in 1537 in his bull, or decree, Sublimus
Deus ("The Transcendent God"), according to which Indian
savages were human beings; they had souls and, as such, could be initiated
into the Christian religion. This left the problem of how to reconcile the
increasingly manifest human diversity with the theological requirement of
human unity. One solution was to account for diversity in terms of
environment, including cultural environment, and to regard the
"savage" as a "primitive," as a "man of
nature," who remained close to an initial state from which a privileged
part of humanity had been able to remove itself by a continued effort at
community and individual advancement. A study of the history of man
endeavoured to bring to light the successive stages through which the human
species had passed along the way to the present civilized societies. The
themes of "civilization" and "progress" were among the
principal preoccupations of the Enlightenment.
What has come to be known as the Enlightenment
is characterized by an optimistic faith in the ability of man to develop
progressively by using reason. By coming to know both himself and the
natural world better he is able to develop morally and materially,
increasingly dominating both his own animal instincts and the natural world
that forms his environment. However, the divergence between rationalist and
empiricist traditions continues, giving rise to rather different
interpretations of this theme.
The writings of the Scottish
philosopher David Hume give a clear
statement of the implications of empiricist
epistemology for the study of man. Hume argued first that scientific
knowledge of the natural world can consist only of conjectures as to the
laws, or regularities, to be found in the sequence of natural phenomena. Not
only must the causes of the phenomenal regularities remain unknown but the
whole idea of a reality behind and productive of experience must be
discounted as making no sense, for experience can afford nothing on the
basis of which to understand such talk. Given that this is so, and given
that man also observes regularities in human behaviour, the sciences of man
are possible and can be put on exactly the same footing as the natural
sciences. The observed regularities of human conduct can be systematically
recorded and classified, and this is all that any science can or should aim
to achieve. Explanation of these regularities (by reference to the essence
of man) is not required in the sciences of man any more than explanation of
regularities is required in the natural sciences. (see also social
science)
Man thus becomes an object of study
by natural history in the widest possible sense. All observations--whether
of physiology, behaviour, or culture--contribute to the empirical knowledge
of man. There is no need, beyond one of convenience, to compartmentalize
these observations, since the method of study is the same whether marital
customs or skin colour is the topic of investigation; the aim is to record
observations in a systematic fashion making generalizations where possible.
Such investigations into the natural history of man were undertaken by
Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach, among others.
In his Systema
Naturae (1735), the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus
(Carl von Linné) gave a very precise description of man,
placing him among the mammals in the order of primates, alongside the apes
and the bat. But the distinguishing characteristic of man remains his use of
reason; something that is not dependent on any physiological
characteristics. Moreover, the variations that are to be found within the
genus Homo sapiens are the product
of culture and climate. In later editions of Systema
Naturae, Linnaeus presented a summary of the diverse varieties of the
human species. The Asian, for example, is "yellowish, melancholy,
endowed with black hair and brown eyes," and has a character that is
"severe, conceited, and stingy. He puts on loose clothing. He is
governed by opinion." The African is recognizable by the colour of his
skin, by his kinky hair, and by the structure of his face. "He is sly,
lazy, and neglectful. He rubs his body with oil or grease. He is governed by
the arbitrary will of his masters." As for the white European, "he
is changeable, clever, and inventive. He puts on tight clothing. He is
governed by laws." Here mentality, clothes, political order, and
physiology are all taken into account.
The French naturalist Georges
Leclerc, comte de Buffon, devoted two of the
44 volumes of his Histoire
naturelle, général et particulière (1749-1804) to
man as a zoological species. Buffon criticized Linnaeus' system and all
other systems of classification that depended only on external
characteristics; to force individual objects into a rational set of
categories was to impose an artificial construct on nature. He was echoing
arguments that Locke had used, arguments based on the conception of the
Great Chain of Being as a continuum, not as a sequence of discrete steps. An
artificial taxonomy came from the mind, not from nature, and achieved
precision at the expense of verisimilitude. Buffon's answer was to determine
species not by characteristics but by their reproductive history. Two
individual animals or plants are of the same species if they can produce
fertile offspring. Species as so defined necessarily have a temporal
dimension: a species is known only through the history of its propagation.
This means that it is absurd to use the same principles for classifying
living and nonliving things. Rocks do not mate and have offspring, so the
taxonomy of the mineral kingdom cannot be based on the same principles as
that of the animal and vegetable kingdom. Similarly, according to Buffon,
there is "an infinite distance" between animal and man, for
"man is a being with reason, and the
animal is one without reason." Thus, "the most stupid of men can
command the most intelligent of animals . . . because he has a reasoned
plan, an order of actions, and a series of means by which he can force the
animal to obey him." The ape, even if in its external characteristics
it is similar to man, is deprived of thought and all that is distinctive of
man. Ape and man differ in temperament, in gestation period, in the rearing
and growth of the body, in length of life, and in all the habits that Buffon
regarded as constituting the nature of a particular being. Most important,
apes and other animals lack the ability to speak. This is significant in
that Buffon saw the rise of human intelligence as a product of development
of an articulated language. But this
linguistic ability is the primary manifestation of the presence of reason
and is not merely dependent on physiology. Animals lack speech not because
they cannot produce articulated sound sequences, but because, lacking minds,
they have no ideas to give meaning to these sounds.
The German scholar Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach is recognized as the father of physical
anthropology for his work De Generis
Humani Varietate Nativa ("On the Natural Variety of Mankind"),
published in 1775 or 1776. He also regarded language as an important
distinguishing characteristic of man, but added that it is only man who is
capable of laughing and crying. Perhaps most important is the suggestion,
also made by the American statesman Benjamin Franklin, that it is only man
who has hands that make him capable of fashioning tools.
This was a suggestion that broke new ground in that it opened up the
possibility of speculating on a physiological origin for the development of
intellectual capacities.
The great German philosopher Immanuel
Kant credited Hume with having wakened him from his dogmatic
slumbers. But while Kant concurred with Hume in rejecting the possibility of
taking metaphysics as a philosophical starting point (dogmatic metaphysics),
he did not follow him in dismissing the need for metaphysics altogether.
Instead he returned to the Cartesian project of seeking to find in the
structure of consciousness itself something that would point beyond it.
Thus, Kant started from the same
point as the empiricists, but with Cartesian consciousness--the experience
of the individual considered as a sequence of mental states. But instead of
asking the empiricists' question of how it is that man acquires such
concepts as number, space, or colour, he enquired into the conditions under
which the conscious awareness of mental states--as states of mind and as
classifiable states distinguished by what they purport to represent--is
possible. The empiricist simply takes the character of the human
mind--consciousness and self-consciousness--for granted as a given of human
nature and then proceeds to ask questions concerning how experience,
presumed to come in the form of sense perceptions, gives rise to all of
man's various ideas and ways of thinking. The methods proposed for this
investigation are observational, and thus the study is continuous with
natural history. The enterprise overlaps with what would now be called
cognitive psychology but includes introspection
regarded simply as self-observation. But this clearly begs a number of
questions, in particular, how the empiricist can claim knowledge of the
human mind and of the character of the experience that is the supposed
origin of all ideas.
Even Hume was forced to admit that
self-observation, or introspection, given the supposed model of experience
as a sequence of ideas and impressions, can yield nothing more than an
impression of current or immediately preceding mental states. Experiential
self-knowledge, on this model, is impossible. The knowing subject, by his
effort to know himself, is already changing himself so that he can only know
what he was, not what he is. Thus, any empirical study, whether it be of man
or of the natural world, must be based on foundations that can only be
provided by a nonempirical, philosophical investigation into the conditions
of the possibility of the form of knowledge sought. Without this foundation
an empirical study cannot achieve any unified conception of its object and
never will be able to attain that systematic, theoretically organized
character that is demanded of science.
The method of such philosophical
investigation is that of critical reflection--employing reason
critically--not that of introspection or inner observation. It is here that
the origin of what has come to be regarded as philosophical anthropology in
the stricter, third sense (i.e.,
20th-century humanism) can be identified, since there is an insistence that
studies of the knowing and moral subject must be founded in a philosophical
study. But there remain questions about the humanity of Kant's subject.
Kant's position was still firmly dualist; the conscious subject constitutes
itself through the opposition between experience of itself as free and
active (in inner sense) and of the thoroughly deterministic, mechanistic,
and material world (in the passive receptivity of outer sense). The subject
with which philosophy is thus concerned is finite and rational, limited by
the constraint that the content of its knowledge is given in the form of
sense experience rather than pure intellectual intuition. This is not a
differentiated individual subject but a form of which individual minds are
instantiations. The ideals regulating this subject are purely rational
ideals. This tendency is even more marked in the philosophies of Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel.
Humanist thought is anthropocentric in that it places man at the centre and treats him
as the point of origin. There are different ways of doing this, however, two
of which are illustrated in the works of Locke
and Kant, respectively. The first, realist, position assumes at the outset a
contrast between an external, independently existing world and the conscious
human subject. In this view man is presented as standing "outside"
of the physical world that he observes. This conception endorses an
instrumental view of the relation between man and the nonhuman, natural
world and is therefore most frequently found to be implicit in the thought
of those enthusiastic about modern technological science. Nature, from this
viewpoint, exists for man, who by making increasingly accurate conjectures
as to the laws governing the regular succession of natural events is able to
increase his ability to predict them and so to control his environment. (see
also realism)
The second, idealist position,
argues that the world exists only in being an object of human thought; it
exists only by virtue of man's conceptualization of it. In the form in which
Kant expressed this position the thought that constitutes the material,
physical world, is that of a transcendent mind, of which the actual minds of
humans are merely vehicles. (see also idealism)
There is also a third, dialectical,
form of anthropocentrism, which, although it did not emerge fully until the
19th century, was prefigured in the works of Vico
and Herder. From this standpoint the
relation between man and nature is regarded as an integral part to the
dynamic whole of which it is a part. The world is what it is as a result of
being lived in and transformed by human beings, while people, in turn,
acquire their character from their existence in a particular situation
within the world. Any thought about the world is concerned with a world as
lived through a subject, who is also part of the world about which he
thinks. There is no possibility of transcendence in thought to some
external, non-worldly standpoint. Such a position wants both to grant the
independent existence of the world and to stress the active and creative
role of human beings within it. It is within this relatively late form of
humanism--which arose from a synthesis of elements of the Kantian position,
with the insights of the Italian Giambattista Vico and the German Johann
Gottfried von Herder--that philosophical anthropology in the third sense can
be located.
Vico's Scienza
nuova (1725; The New Science of Giambattista Vico) announced not so much a new
science as the need to recognize a new form of scientific knowledge. He
argued (against empiricists) that the study of man must differ in its method
and goals from that of the natural world. This is because the nature of man
is not static and unalterable; a person's own efforts to understand the
world and adapt it to his needs, physical and spiritual, continuously
transform that world and himself. Each individual is both the product and
the support of a collective consciousness that defines a particular moment
in the history of the human spirit. Each epoch interprets the sum of its
traditions, norms, and values in such a way
as to impose a model for behaviour on daily life as well as on the more
specialized domains of morals and religion and art. Given that those who
make or create something can understand it in a way in which mere observers
of it cannot, it follows that if, in some sense, people make their own
history, they can understand history in a way in which they cannot
understand the natural world, which is only observed by them. The natural
world must remain unintelligible to man; only God, as its creator, fully
understands it. History, however, being concerned with human actions, is
intelligible to humans. This means, moreover, that the succession of phases
in the culture of a given society or people cannot be regarded as governed
by mechanistic, causal laws. To be intelligible these successions must be
explicable solely in terms of human, goal-directed activity. Such
understanding is the product neither of sense perception nor of rational
deduction but of imaginative reconstruction. Here Vico asserted that, even
though a person's style of thought is a product of the phase of culture in
which he participates, it is nonetheless possible for him to understand
another culture and the transitions between cultural phases. He assumed that
there is some underlying commonality of the needs, goals, and requirement
for social organization that makes this possible. (see also history, philosophy of)
Herder denied the existence of any
such absolute and universally recognized goals. This denial carried the
disturbing implication that the specific values and goals pursued by various
human cultures may not only differ but also may not all be mutally
compatible. Hence, not only may cultural transitions not all be
intelligible, but conflict may not be an attribute of the human condition
that can be eliminated. If this is so, then the notion of a single code of
precepts for the harmonious, ideal way of life, which underlies mainstream
Western thought and to which--whether they know it or not--all human beings
aspire, could not be sustained. There will be many ways of living, thinking,
and feeling, each self-validating but not mutually compatible or comparable
nor capable of being integrated into a harmonious pluralistic society.
The 19th century was a time of
greatly increased activity in the sciences of man. There was a
correspondingly rapid development of various disciplines, but this was
accompanied by increasing specialization within disciplines. Perhaps the
most significant theme, common to all branches of science, was the declining
influence of religion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had concurred
in thinking that the transcendence of God doomed to failure any attempt to
encompass him within the framework of human discourse. Theological discourse
was thus only human discourse. Herder had stated, "It is necessary to
read the Bible in a human manner, for it is a book written by men for
men." Even so, he insisted, "The fact that religion is integrally
human is a profound sign in recognition of its truth." But with human
truth the only available truth, such a line was hard to maintain, and by the
late 19th century the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche had announced that God was dead.
But the death of God also meant that
the essence of God in every man was dead--that which was common to all and
that in virtue of which the individual transcended the natural, material
world and his purely biological nature. Also dead was the part of a person
that recognized universal God-given ideals of reason and truth, goodness and
beauty. There thus emerged views of man that, while integrating him more
thoroughly with the natural world--treating his incarnation as an essential
aspect of his condition--had to come to terms with the consequences for
science, morality, and the study of man himself of the removal of a
transcendent support for belief in absolute standards or ideals.
The presumption of a fixed human
nature was undercut at the level of natural history by the emergence and
eventual acceptance of evolutionary biology.
This added a historical, developmental dimension to the natural history of
man, which complimented developmental views of culture and of man as a
culturally constituted being. But more importantly, evolutionary biology
made man a direct descendant of nonhuman primates and suggested that the
gift of reason, which so many had seen as establishing a gulf between man
and animal, might too have developed gradually and might indeed have a
physiological basis.
Even though Buffon had tied
classification to the ability to reproduce, and had thus introduced a
temporal dimension into the characterization of species, he had retained the
idea of stable species. But a static classification could not explain the
dynamic relations between isolated species. A primitive time line of natural
history thus developed. The relationship of families led to the idea of
filiation between them according to an order of succession. The
interpretation of fossils aroused impassioned debates. From them have arisen
concepts of mutation (the process by which thegenetic material of a cell is
altered), transformism (the theory that one species is changed into
another), and evolution. These concepts, already being formulated in the
18th century, were clarified in the work of Lamarck and Darwin.
The evolutionary theory of Charles
Darwin's Origin
of Species (1859) differed from that of Jean-Baptiste
de Lamarck in that it proposed a mechanistic, nonpurposive account of
evolution as the product of the natural selection of randomly produced
genetic mutations (survival of the fittest).
Advantageous characteristics acquired by an individual were not, as Lamarck
had thought, inherited and therefore could not play a role in evolutionary
development.
The theme of continuity with the
rest of the natural world was one that was also to be found in the very
different, antiscientific thought of Romanticism,
which was one of the reactions to the rise of the doctrine of mechanism and
to the Industrial Revolution for which it was held responsible. The
experience of the Industrial Revolution was crucial to most 19th-century
thought about man. Reactions to this experience can be put into three broad
categories. There were those who saw in industrialization
the progressive triumph of reason over nature, making possible the march of
civilization and the moral triumph of reason over animal instinct. This was
a view that continued the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its confidence
in reason and the ability to advance through science. Into this category can
be put the English philosopher John Stuart Mill,
a stout defender of liberal individualism. Mill's philosophy was in many
respects a continuation of that of Hume but with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian view that the foundation of all
morality is the principle that one should always act so as to produce the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. This ethical principle gives a
prominent place to the sciences of man (which are conceived as being
parallel in method to the natural sciences), their study deemed necessary
for an empirical determination of the social and material conditions that
produce the greatest general happiness. This is a non-dialectical,
naturalistic humanism, which gives primacy to the individual and stresses
the importance of his freedom. For Mill, all social phenomena, and therefore
ultimately all social changes, are products of the actions of individuals.
(see also Utilitarianism)
The humanist opponents of capitalist
industrialization fall into two groups, both presuming some form of
dialectical humanism: those who, like Marx, retained a faith in the
scientific application of reason and those who, like Goethe and Schiller,
fundamentally questioned the humanity of mechanistic science and the
technology it spawned.
The Romantics questioned the
instrumental conception of the relation between man and nature, which is
fundamental to the thinking behind much technological science. They insisted
on an organic relation between man and the rest of nature. It is not man's
place outside of nature that is emphasized but his situation within it.
Equally central to this view was a recognition of the historicity of human
culture and a rejection of any conception of a fixed, determined human
nature on which a science of man parallel in structure to the natural
sciences (i.e., a science with laws, whether empirical or rational, that
determine the actions and the historical development of mankind) could be
based. There was a continued commitment to the perspective of the
individual, and his creative relation with the world, an orientation that
was carried over into the philosophical anthropology of 20th-century
phenomenologists and existentialists, with their critiques of modern
industrial science.
The Marxist opposition to capitalist
industrialization is not to industrialization as such but to capitalist
forms of it. This opposition is founded on socialism,
which stresses the role of social structures; it is at the level of
society--its structures and its economic base of production--that the course
of history can be understood. Marx
emphasized the importance of labour and work in man's relation both to the
natural and to the social worlds in which he finds himself and which
condition his ability to realize himself through these relationships. He
deplored the loss of humanity associated with capitalist industrialization,
which was manifest in the alienating conditions under which members of the
working class were treated as objects and thus deprived of their full status
as human subjects by their industrial masters. Nonetheless, he retained a
faith in scientific knowledge and in the possibility of a scientific
understanding of history by integrating its economic, social, and political
aspects. Marx argued, however, that it was not reason but revolution that
would cause the overthrow of the capitalist system. (see also Marxism)
Common to all of these reactions is
that whether they privileged reason or not they did not seek to validate the
claims of reason--and hence the claims of science--by reference to a
rational God. But with this transcendent guarantor removed, the question of
the objectivity of rational standards and of the commonality of human
thought structures became pressing. The Cartesian starting point focused
attention on thought as a sequence of ideas, knowable only to the individual
concerned. Animals, even if capable of uttering structured sound sequences,
were denied linguistic abilities on the ground that these sound sequences
could not be the expressions of thoughts and could not have meaning; lacking
minds, animals also lack ideas, the thoughts that give words their meaning.
According to this view, words are simply conventionally established vehicles
for the communication of thoughts that exist prior to, and independent of,
their linguistic expression. However, if it is not assumed that human minds
are all instantiations of a single transcendent mind, or that although
individual they were created from a common pattern, this account of
linguistic communication must appear inadequate. Since according to
Cartesianism introspection is the only route to awareness of ideas, each
person can only ever be aware of his own ideas, never of those of another.
He could never know that his attempts to communicate succeed in calling up
in another person's mind ideas similar to those in his own. Some new way of
looking at linguistic communication was required, and this could be nothing
short of a new starting point, a new way of thinking about thought itself.
The mood of the late 19th century,
which has also dominated 20th-century philosophy, can be characterized as
anti-psychologistic--a rejection of introspective, idea-oriented ways of
thinking about thought, which presume that thought is prior to language.
This fundamental reorientation had implications for every other aspect of
the study of man. The writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who
most influenced subsequent philosophical thought about man were Gottlob
Frege, Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Sigmund Freud. Each helped
to transform one of the three reactions to the Industrial Revolution
outlined above, to bring it into accord with the new, anti-psychologistic
orientation: Frege influenced the empiricist, scientific reaction; Husserl
the Romantic; and Saussure and Freud the scientific Socialist.
Frege argued that if language is to
be a vehicle for the expression of objective, scientific knowledge of the
world, then the meaning (cognitive content)
of a linguistic expression must be the same for all users of the language to
which it belongs and must be determined independently of the psychological
states of any individual. A word may call up a variety of ideas in the mind
of an individual user, but these are not part of its meaning. Such
associations may be important to the poet but are irrelevant to the
scientist. The function of language in the expression of scientific
knowledge is to represent an independently existing world. The meanings of
linguistic expressions must thus derive from their relation to the world,
not from their relation to the minds of language users. Similarly, logic--embodying
the principles of reasoning and the standards of rationality--must be
concerned not with laws of human thought, but with laws of truth. The
principles of correct reasoning must be justified by reference to the
function of language in representing the world correctly or incorrectly
rather than by reference to human psychology.
It is for his work on formal logic,
which stemmed from these ideas, that Frege is renowned, because it opened
the way for the mechanical reproduction of reasoning processes, which was
crucial to the development of information processing by computers and for
devices capable of artificial intelligence. Frege argued that the principles
of deductive reasoning are purely formal principles, which means that their
correct application does not depend on an ability to understand the
sentences involved, so long as they have been put into the correct logical
form. To give an account of the meaning of a sentence requires that it be
analyzed so as to reveal its logical form. The logical analysis of everyday
and scientific language thus becomes a primary focus of philosophical
activity, hence the name "analytic
philosophy" for the tradition, predominating in Great Britain,
North America, and Australasia that can be regarded as post-Fregean
philosophy. In this tradition the focus is on the analysis of rational,
human thought, where it is presumed that the only correct way to do this is
to analyze the logical structure of language.
Thus language has replaced God as
the locus of rationality and of principles of reason; and the language-world
relation has taken over many of the roles previously played by the God-world
relation. The individual participates in a rationality that is independent
of him to the extent that he is a language user. The position assumes that
standards of rationality are absolute, since they are seen as necessarily
governing the meaning structures of all languages. The linguist Noam
Chomsky proposed a thesis that was regarded as being complimentary to
this philosophical position, namely that of a universal grammar--a formal
structure that underlies all languages, no matter how diverse their
grammatical forms seem on the surface. Moreover, he suggested that all
humans have the same innate capacity to learn language, which explains why
it is that they all structure their languages, and hence their thought, in
the same way.
A further assumption (christened the
"principle of charity" by the American philosopher Donald
Davidson) is that all humans are rational and that the majority of human
behaviour is to be explained as rational, given the beliefs and desires of
the person concerned. This, together with the view that language is the
locus of rationality and the embodiment of thought, leads to the view that
the primary objective of the sciences of man is to interpret the language of
a community under study so as to attribute beliefs and desires to its
members on the basis of what they say, and so give some explanation of their
behaviour. The interpretation is deemed incorrect if the attributed beliefs
and desires result in too much behaviour being portrayed as irrational.
There will then be a mutual adjustment between language interpretation and
the explanation of behaviour in which there can be no final separation of
the two and no such thing as a uniquely correct interpretation. There is
thus no hope of finding laws linking psychological states of belief or
desire to physiological states, even though, by maintaining that each mental
event is just a physical event under a different description, a dualism of
mind and body is denied. What remains is an irreducible dualism between
physiological and psychosocial studies of man. The situation is frequently
explained by utilizing a computer analogy (for the computer is, in this
view, man creating a machine in his own image). The relation between the
structures of thought and the body is likened to the relation between
computer software and hardware; the same hardware may be used to run
different software, and the same software may be run on different hardware.
The two descriptions of computer functioning are thus relatively
independent.
In this account the consciousness of
the individual plays little explicit role, but a model of man is
nevertheless implicit in the whole approach. It is still basically the model
employed by Hume, with experience consisting of sensory stimuli. Experience
of other people is thus limited to observation of their physical and
behavioral characteristics. It is on the basis of such observations that we
have to make conjectures about their mental states. What has changed is the
method of making such attributions. It is not sufficient to argue by analogy
from introspection; any attribute of rational or mental faculties must go
via an analytic interpretation of the language spoken. But with the
assumption that all languages must share a common logical structure in
virtue of their function in representing the world, there is also an inbuilt
presumption of a uniformity in the rational structure of all human thought.
Husserl is regarded as the founder
of phenomenology. He, like Frege, wished to
avoid the so-called psychologism of idea-based discussions of thought and
rejected naturalistic approaches to the study of the mind and of what passes
for rational thought. He, too, believed that laws of reasoning needed to be
validated by reference to the objects of thought, but he did not agree that
logic could be made purely formal and independent of the particular subject
matter in hand, nor did he agree that the primary focus should be on
language. Indeed, he rejected the position from which Frege started, namely,
the assumption that there is a clear separation between the knowing subject
and an independently existing reality that is the object of his knowledge.
This assumption, Husserl argued, reveals a blindness to the conditions, or
presuppositions, involved in all knowledge and already analyzed in part by
Kant. Husserl adopted Kant's strategy but in a more radical form that was
designed to restore the in-the-worldness of the human subject.
The program of phenomenology aimed
at rigorous understanding of the life-world. Kant had explored the
conditions of the possibility of experience, and in so doing he had presumed
that this experience was always that of an "I," a subject. Husserl
also asked after the conditions for the possibility of a consciousness that
is always potentially self-conscious. He claimed that all consciousness is
intentional; i.e., is
consciousness of something. The method pursued was a phenomenal
investigation of the "contents of consciousness." This required
the investigator to "bracket off" all theories, presuppositions,
and evidence of existence, including his own existence. There could be no
dogmas. The implication was still that the individual can, in principle,
abstract from every influence of culture and environment by abstracting also
from that element of consciousness that involves awareness of self. It was
presumed that consciousness as such had structures that would then be
revealed. It is only self-conscious thought that is culturally constituted;
for Husserl, each human individual is by necessity socially and historically
conditioned by his environment. But even so it has to be doubted whether the
required abstraction from self is possible in the sort of consciousness--i.e.,
reflective rational thought--that is required of a rigorous phenomenological
analysis.
Descartes and his successors had
taken the self, the individual subject, for granted and in the process
inevitably had assigned to the knowing subject a position outside, beyond,
or transcending the world of which he sought knowledge. Husserl, by putting
the individual subject into the field of philosophical investigation, paved
the way for investigations of the human condition that start with the
concrete, with man's being-in-the world. In this respect he can also be
regarded as the founder of philosophical anthropology in the narrowest sense
of the term: the personal unity of the human being becomes both the point of
departure and the goal of philosophical reflection. The use of philosophical
anthropology to characterize this approach emerged in the first half of the
20th century with the tendency both in Germany and in France to treat the
problems of anthropology as the centre of all philosophical studies. Its
emergence at this time may be seen as a reaction to the totalitarian systems
of the 20th century: Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism under Stalin, and
German Nazism were powerful ideologies calling for the annihilation of the
individual character of the person. The philosophical protests of the German
phenomenologist Max Scheler, of the Russian existentialist Nikolay
Berdyayev, of the Jewish philosophical theologian Martin Buber, and of the
French personalist Emmanuel Mounier offered answers to this challenge; the
philosophies of the person and of existence present to each individual the
means to centre himself upon himself.
Husserl's work not only gave rise to
phenomenology but also to the existentialist
ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul
Sartre. Heidegger adopted the method of phenomenology but rejected Husserl's
refusal to allow existence to feature in the phenomenological starting
point. Heidegger argued for a philosophy in which man's being-in-the-world
is registered, and where this being (existence) precedes any determination
of what man is (his essence).
In his Brief
über den "Humanismus" (1947; Brief
Letter on Humanism), Heidegger wrote:
Are we really on the right track
toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature
among others in contrast to plants, beasts and God? . . . when we do this we
abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas
but attribute a specific difference to him. In principle we are still
thinking of homo animalitas--even
when anima (soul) is posited as animus
sive mens, and this in turn is later posited as subject, person, or
spirit (geist). Such positing is in the manner of metaphysics.
Naturalistic definitions of man
fail, because like all traditional metaphysical definitions they naively
assume that we know what we mean when we say of something that it is; i.e., when we ascribe being to it.
Humanity and the world form a whole
in which neither is privileged. The focus shifts from intentional objects of
consciousness to the world itself, a world of objects that appear (and hence
exist as individualized objects) only insofar as they have meaning and
significance for human beings, by virtue of the way in which they relate to
human projects. A fallen tree branch is noticed as firewood only by one who
is in search of fuel. Similarly, events are noticed and recorded and so
become historical events but only in the light of the meaning that they have
for the historian. This means that neither history nor the study of man can
be objective and purely factual history. History is always a story about the
past from someone who has a specific vantage point within history.
Sartre,
in L'Être
et le néant (1943; Being
and Nothingness), tried to tread a middle line between Husserl and
Heidegger, retaining the concrete in-the-worldness of Heidegger while
restoring a place for intentional consciousness. He hoped to provide an
account of, as he put it,
intentional-consciousness-in-the-world-as-it-is-lived. Sartre's driving
belief was in human freedom, the ability to choose not only a course of
action but also what one would become. Neither Husserl, with his already
structured and regulated consciousness, nor Heidegger, with his world that
is already given meaning, left enough room for freedom. (see also free will)
Sartre insisted on the dualism of
being (thingness) and consciousness (no-thingness) and of the individual in
itself and for itself. The disjunction between these is absolute: no state
of the world can determine human action, even to the extent of providing a
motive, or reason, for action. If man is truly free, the world, whether
material or social, can place no constraints on him, not even to the extent
of determining what would or would not be good reasons for following a given
course of action. He must create his own values and his own morality and
take responsibility for his choices. Sartre's critics pointed out, however,
that this total freedom dissolves into arbitrariness and randomness. An
action that is selected at whim, chosen without (or beyond) reason, and that
recognizes no rational constraints, is more an abandonment to fate than an
assertion of freedom; where there is no basis for decision there is simply
the necessity to choose. (see also mind)
In his later writings, and in
particular the Critique
de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique
of Dialectical Reason), which attempts a reconciliation between
existentialism and Marxism, Sartre came to
recognize that there are constraints on the exercise of human freedom. He
first acknowledged that man is a creature with biological needs, who must
eat, drink, shelter, and clothe himself as a condition of being able to
engage in other kinds of activity; and, second, he saw the struggle against
need as conditioned by the fact that it takes place in conditions of
scarcity. This means that there is competition for resources and thus the
ever-present likelihood that the realization of an individual's freedom will
limit that of another. Each individual in these conditions experiences
others as possible threats to his own freedom (i.e.,
he experiences alienation).
Individuals whose freedom is in this
way conditioned, not just by naturally occurring material conditions but by
the materiality of human practice, are (as Marx had said) both
"subjects" and "objects" of history. But Sartre insisted
that history is only intelligible because it records a process brought into
being by human action. This rules out an understanding of history based on a
"dialectic of nature," adopted by some Marxists whom Sartre
criticized as being dogmatists. Sartre thus rejected the idea that there
could be any naturalistic science of humanity--a science that proceeds by
discovering laws without reference to the consciousness of individuals.
History is neither a mere process (without a subject) nor the product of
some form of social, collective "subject." But this does not mean
that individuals can be treated as wholly independent units that can be
understood without taking into account the formative and conditioning role
of their material and social situation. It is in this work that Sartre was
still facing up to, and grappling with, the problem of the reconciliation of
the demands of freedom and reason, but in an altogether more practical and
concrete way than was done by his 17th-century predecessors. (see also history,
philosophy of)
Sartre's abandonment of the radical
freedom of Being and Nothingness
owed much to the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's criticism of it--in Sens
et non-sens (1948; Sense and
Non-Sense)--as being still a dualist philosophy of consciousness and for
failing to put man truly in the world. In Sense
and Non-Sense he also expressed his view of the relation between
existentialism and Marxism:
Marx gives us an objective
definition of class in terms of the effective position of individuals in the
production cycle, but he tells us elsewhere that class cannot become a
decisive historical force and revolutionary factor unless individuals become
aware of it, adding that this awareness itself has social motives, and so
on. As a historical factor, class is therefore neither a simple objective
fact, nor is it, on the other hand, a simple value arbitrarily chosen by
solitary consciousnesses.
In Merleau-Ponty's writing there is
also a clear statement of the human presupposition that forms the basis of
philosophical anthropology in this third sense:
I am not the result or the
intersection of multiple causalities that determine my body or my
"psychism"; I cannot conceive of myself as nothing but a part of
the world, as the simple object of biology, psychology, and sociology, nor
close over myself the universe of science. Everything that I know of the
world, even through science, I know from a viewpoint that is my own . . .
One effect of the insistence that it
is concrete, lived experience that must form the starting point of
philosophical anthropology is that not only must class and its experience
enter into such accounts, but so too must sex and gender. Once the human
subject, as a focus of philosophical attention, is no longer a mind whose
relation to a body is at best obscure, is no longer a pure consciousness,
but is essentially embodied and immersed in human culture, the biological
differences between the sexes and the socially constituted role
differentiation between male and female must play a part in the account of
humanity.
In Simone
de Beauvoir's Deuxième Sexe (1949; The
Second Sex), she used the categories provided by Sartre to argue that to
be a woman--as distinct from a man--is to be robbed of one's subjectivity,
to be treated as an object by men, and to have one's conception of oneself
as female defined by men. To assert her subjectivity a woman must thus
negate her femininity, to reject the status of object for men that
constitutes the feminine. A woman is thus placed in a condition of
self-alienation, with which a man does not have to contend. In this way de
Beauvoir revealed the need for a philosophy of "man" that is also
a philosophy of "woman," a viewpoint that generally has been
acknowledged only by female writers. (see also sexism)
Just as class and gender determine
the way in which one lives in the world and is related to the world, so too
may religion. Even for those not brought up in any religion, Western culture
is still one in which religion is significant. Philosophical anthropology
must thus take the phenomenon of religious experience seriously, in a way
that empiricist anthropology does not. But its starting point is with the
constitution of a religious consciousness, and with the conditions of the
possibility of the forms of religion encountered; it does not start with theology.
There is room once again for dispute over the possibility of any kind of
transcendence. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard thought that man's existence has meaning only in the
experience of grace, which inexplicably raises man up from his
worthlessness. The anguish and loneliness of mortal existence, the
"wretchedness of man without God," is only overcome by a form of
experience that confers faith in the existence of God and hence the ultimate
possibility of human transcendence.
Philosophical anthropology in its
narrowest (third) sense is founded on an insistence that the only knowledge
available to man is knowledge from his human perspective, conditioned, as he
himself is, by his situation in the world. God cannot be invoked as a source
of absolute standards of truth or of absolute values nor to give content to
the supposition that there are any. If God exists, then the thought that
there are such standards and values, even if we cannot know of them, remains
possible. This possibility was denied with Nietzsche's proclamation of the
death of God; the attempt to come to terms with this view defines the scope
of most philosophical anthropology. The view of religion that reflects the
inversion which takes place was expressed by Ludwig
Feuerbach in Das
Wesen des Christentums (1841; The
Essence of Christianity), when he declared that "man is not a
shadow of God; it is God who is the shadow of man, an illusory phantasm that
man nourishes out of his own substance." (see also religion, philosophy of)
There were also those, however, who
saw the death of God as heralding the death of man as the focus and starting
point for philosophy. Saussure, in his Cours
de linguistique général (1915; Course
in General Linguistics), held, like Frege, that the meaning of a
linguistic sign, that which gives it a value
for the purposes of communication, could not be an idea in the mind of an
individual. But unlike Frege he did not concentrate on the relation between language
and an external world. Rather, he argued that the meaning of any one
linguistic sign is dependent on its relation to other signs in the language
to which it belongs; thus, the meaning of one sign is determined by its
place in the overall structure that constitutes a language. A consequence of
this view is that language becomes a closed, autonomous system. Linguistic
signs do not depend for their meaning on anything external to language.
Moreover, Saussure argued that the present meaning of a word could not be
revealed by tracing its etymology. It is only by reference to present
language structures that current meanings are determined. The language
structures that become the focus of attention are thus to be treated as
autonomous from their history (i.e.,
as if they had no history).
With this focus on structures and
the method of studying them, Saussure can be considered to be one of the
founding figures of structuralism. This view
of meaning came to be extended from linguistic signs to all kinds of human
actions to which a conventional meaning, or significance, is attributed. It
has been used as the framework for anthropological investigations of
cultures, their customs, etc., as, for example, in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss
or in the interpretation of dreams and the structures of the unconscious in
the works of Jacques Lacan.
It is significant that, again,
meaning is studied without reference to the consciousness of individual
language speakers. Man is treated as essentially not just a language speaker
but as a user and interpreter of signs, and the significance of these signs
is determined without reference to any relation to the individual. A
language, or sign-system, takes over the role of providing the framework of
reason in which significance is given, but this framework transcends the
individual. Such systems of codification regulate all human experience and
activity and yet lie beyond the control of either individual or social
groups. Indeed, since there is no meaning or understanding outside of a
given sign-system, it is only from the meaning of the signs he
"uses" that the individual comes to learn what it is that he means
by his action, and hence what he thinks. This is why such views of language
can readily be grafted onto Freud's theory of the unconscious.
Freud
treated the realm of the mind as one that is as law-governed as is the
natural world; nothing that a person does or says is haphazard or
accidental, for everything can in principle be traced to causes that are
somehow in the person's mind, although many of these are not accessible to
consciousness. Freud's view of the human mind is thus very different from
Descartes's. For Freud, the part of the mind that is accessible to
consciousness is but the tip of a large iceberg; the hidden remainder, which
influences the conscious, is the unconscious.
Thus, for instance, there are unconscious desires that can cause someone to
do things that he cannot explain rationally to others, or even to himself.
In this there is a parallel between Freud and Marx, for both hold views on
which human consciousness, far from being perfectly free and rational, is
really determined by causes of which man is not aware; but whereas Marx says
that these causes are social and economic in nature, Freud claims that they
are individual and mental. In both cases the implications for the study of
man are anti-psychologistic in that they turn attention away from the
individual consciousness. On both views a scientific understanding of man is
only to be gained by examining the factors that determine consciousness
rather than the level of the individual subject of consciousness.
In his later expositions (those
given in the 1920s) Freud assigned to the mind a tripartite structure: the id,
which contains all the instinctual drives seeking immediate satisfaction;
the ego, which deals with the world outside
the person, mediating between it and the id; and the superego, a special
part of the ego that contains the conscience, the social norms acquired in
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